


in the spirit of friendship

by pennyofthewild



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen, Humor, Mild Language, i wonder if this counts as, kagami is bad at comforting people, poor kuroko has the 'flu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 13:39:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1019282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennyofthewild/pseuds/pennyofthewild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[“Fine,” Kagami says, “I’ll go make sure Kuroko isn’t dying in a ditch.”]</p><p>Kuroko misses two days of practice in a row. Kagami is an errand boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the spirit of friendship

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt left by an anon at my tumblr. ^^

“Hey,” Hyuuga tells him after practice is over; the locker room has emptied and Kagami is wiping the sweat off his face after completing the extra shooting drills Riko’d assigned him in a fit of pique,

“come with me, I have to talk to you,” and Kagami furrows his eyebrows, flings his towel in the general direction of his schoolbag, set by the bench, and follows Hyuuga from the locker room into the gym.

“Yeah?” Kagami says, hands, open-palmed, on hips. “What’s up?” He watches Hyuuga walk over to the ball crate they’d just put the basketballs away in – it’s an almost a nervous tick, Kagami thinks, Hyuuga’s need to have a ball in his hands when he’s on court – he doesn’t have to be throwing it, even.

“Was Kuroko not in classes today, either?” Hyuuga asks, idly dribbling the basketball in place, the graceful arc of his wrist movement a testament to hours and hours of practice and countless sacrifices in the way of blameless samurai figures.

Kagami has to think. It is still an unfortunate truth that, when not actively looked for (with sufficient effort) Kuroko Tetsuya often goes unnoticed, by almost everyone, even his [best] friend.

“No,” Kagami decides, after rewinding through his memory reel. There had been no unexpected spills or crashes prompted by unseen shadows creeping up on him around corridors and in the cafeteria, no blue-eyed dogs nesting in bright blue hair or peeking out of gym bags, and most definitely no phantom players on the court during practice, because, if the opposite were true, Kagami most certainly not be making useless small talk with his captain in the middle of an empty court this long after practice; he’d be outside, catching a train home with said phantom trailing in his wake.

Hyuuga sighs. “This is his second day absent,” he says, and runs his free hand through his hair. Kagami wonders Hyuuga isn’t suffering from repetitive strain disorder, or something. You don’t get to be the sort of indomitable clutch shooter Hyuuga is by lying in a hammock reading manga and sipping lemonade all afternoon.

“It’s weird,” Kagami allows, because it isn’t like Kuroko to skip school AND practice. Kuroko’s ditched classes before, but as long as Kagami’s known him, he’s always shown up for practice.

Hyuuga mutters something along the lines _of weird is an understatement_ while Kagami looks expectantly at him, waiting for Hyuuga to say something important: and then Hyuuga says,

“Well?”

Kagami blinks. “Well, what? I thought _you_ were gonna tell me something.”

Hyuuga lobs the ball at him. Kagami avoids being slammed in the face out of reflex. His palms sting.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Hyuuga crosses his arms, as if Kuroko’s absence from practice two days in a row is somehow Kagami’s fault.

Kagami wonders if Hyuuga has an older sister, because the look on his face, and the crossed arms, coupled with the way he’s standing, feet slightly apart, make him look like some sort of angry demonic cheerleader villain in a shoujou manga – or, on second thought – the look is all Riko.

“Captain,” Kagami says, feigning wiping something from his eye to hide the fact that he is trying very hard not to laugh, “I didn’t know I was supposed to do anything.”

“Aren’t you two _friends_?” Hyuuga demands, increasing his resemblance to an angry cheerleader/Riko.

“You and Kiyoshi-senpai are friends,” Kagami points out, although the fact isn’t really of much relevance here, apart from the associated aggravating factor.

“Whatever,” Hyuuga pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, “you’re going to go check on him. You should probably take his homework and stuff to him, too.”

Kagami wants very much to express, loudly, _no_ , and _why_ , and _why don’t you do it_ , but Hyuuga’s expression brokers no argument, so Kagami sighs.

“Fine,” he says, “I’ll go make sure Kuroko isn’t dying in a ditch.”

“In the spirit of friendship and teamwork,” Hyuuga reminds him, “and not because you’re an unfeeling jerk and I’m making you go.”

“Whoa, Captain,” Kagami mutters, stalking back towards the locker room to retrieve his things, “you must really like me.”

***

Walking down the street between the rows of neatly-kept gardens and equally-neat houses in Kuroko’s district, Kagami reminds himself that he doesn’t actually mind doing this – going over to Kuroko’s, the added weight of Kuroko’s worksheets slung over his shoulder, the paper slip with Kuroko’s home address clutched in his hand – in fact, he might actually be interested in finding out where Kuroko lives –as far as he knows, he’s the first person to visit Kuroko at home since middle school, probably–

House 234 is no different from the other houses on the street: pristine white clapboard on the outside of a two-story bungalow set under a red-brown tiled roof. The garage door is open; there’s no car, but a bicycle stands leaning against the far wall – the walls themselves are lined with the kind of shelves Kagami’s seen in the double-spread pages of the house improvement magazines he finds at his dentist’s.

The footpath up to the green-painted door is gray, and also perfectly ordinary, no weeds between the cracks even, and Kagami’s feeling mighty disappointed at the total lack of mysterious objects by the time he gets to the front door. Logically, it isn’t possible for Kuroko to be so … _mundane_. There should be a talking cat, at the very least.

Kagami rings the doorbell, breathing out in a whoosh, the faint echo of the bell sounding somewhere in the depths of the house. Several moments of silence later, the sound of footsteps on woodwork grows steadily closer, and, with a slight click, the door is pulled open.

There is a small – she barely comes up to Kagami’s chest – blue-eyed woman in an apron over her flowered sundress and a wooden spoon in her hand standing in the doorway. Her hair, approximately the same shade as Kuroko’s, is long, and pulled into a messy side-braid. Kagami guesses Kuroko’s looks come from his mother, if this is his mother.

She gives Kagami an enormous smile. “Hello,” she says, “are you one of Tetsu’s friends?”

“Um, yes,” Kagami says, hoping he doesn’t look/sound too intimidating, “My name’s Kagami Taiga. Is he – Kuroko – in?”

“He’s in his room,” she says, and steps aside so Kagami, once he shucks his sneakers off and sets them, side-by-side near the welcome mat, can walk in, “go right on up: he’s the last door down the hall.”

“Thank you,” Kagami nods, and takes the stairs as fast as he can without actually running. Small people, especially ones with enormous smiles and dangerous-looking wooden spoons in their hands, are terrifying.

“Kagami-kun,” Kuroko’s mother calls when Kagami is on the landing, “would you mind taking this up to Tetsu?” She is standing at the foot of the stairs with a tray, set with a bowl of some sort of soup on top. “Careful,” she says when Kagami reaches her, “it’s hot,” and Kagami makes the second ascent at a much slower pace than before.

He pauses, outside Kuroko’s door, till he’s maneuvered the tray so that he can knock: a moment later someone calls, weakly, “I told you I didn’t want any soup, kaasan.”

Kagami pushes the door open with his shoulder.  “I’d say something clever,” he says, “but you know I suck at that kind of stuff.”

Kuroko is sitting up in his bed, his hair doing an excellent impersonation of a goose’s ruffled feathers, and he is holding a book: a novel, by the fleeting look Kagami gets of its cover. Kuroko drops the book.

“Kagami-kun,” he says, voice stuffy with whatever is playing havoc with his sinuses, “what are you doing here?”

“Right now? Dropping off the soup you don’t want. In general? I’m not sure myself.” He could say Hyuuga sent him, but Kagami, while a little thicker than some, isn’t callous.

“Hyuuga-buchou sent you, didn’t he?” Kuroko says, because he is an ungrateful little moron who can’t appreciate Kagami’s efforts. He sets the novel on his bedside table and pulls several tissues out of the box sitting by his side. “You can put the soup down on the desk,” Kuroko gestures with his chin, his face arranged in an awful sort of grimace.

“You’re an ungrateful little ass, you know that?” Kagami says, and proceeds to make himself at home in Kuroko’s swivel chair. It is annoyingly low, so he plays with the lever till he doesn’t feel as though his knees have been jammed into his chin. When he looks up, Kuroko is looking at him, nose a violent shade of red – or maybe that’s because he’s so damn pale – a curious quirk to his eyebrows.

“What?” Kagami scowls, reflexively, his voice almost too loud.

Kuroko shakes his head and drops his gaze, tossing a rolled-up tissue at the wastepaper basket in the corner of his room. It falls short.

“Don’t,” Kuroko says, when Kagami starts to get up, “I’ll throw it away later.”

“Okay,” Kagami sits back down. Kuroko’s ceiling is peppered with glow-in-the-dark stars that must’ve been put up years ago, judging by the gaps in what once a solar-system-like pattern. His walls are a stark white. His curtains are blue.

There is very little in the way of furniture: the bed (the frame is wooden, and also white, and the covers are blue), the bedside table (set with a lamp and an alarm clock – and the novel), the desk (laptop, desk-light, a stack of papers towards the back, alongside the tray), the swivel chair (Kagami), a bookshelf, and a door that Kagami presumes leads into Kuroko’s closet: but, on the far wall, there is a series of posters and photographs: basketball players, Kagami discovers, squinting: he recognizes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, Yao Ming, Jeremy Lin – and the team at Teiko, Japan’s Generation of Miracles scattered in between NBA greats.

If not for the photo-collage, Kagami thinks, Kuroko’s room would be very, very impersonal.

“Are you done?” Kuroko’s voice breaks Kagami’s reverie.

“Done?” Kagami raises his eyebrows. “Done what?”

“Poking and prodding,” Kuroko says, and Kagami is ready to feel hurt, but there is a different sort of look in Kuroko’s eyes: a little bemused, a little wondering, and – if Kagami is not mistaken – a little grateful and maybe even fond, too.

“I thought you might have a stash of drinking bowls made from the heads of your defeated enemies around here, somewhere,” Kagami leans further back, into the swivel chair, crossing his legs at the ankles. The fondness, Kagami is pleased to see, grows.

“Unless you’ve got x-ray vision,” Kuroko says, “you’d never find it just like that.”

The silence, when it comes, is less awkward than before: more comforting, like sitting in the bus together to and from games, or being on the court, extensions of each other, and the team.

“I brought your homework over,” Kagami says finally, “you want me to leave it on the desk?”

“That’s fine,” Kuroko tells him.

Kagami retrieves Kuroko’s worksheets and sets them on the desk.

“What do you want to do about the soup?”

Kuroko sighs. “Give it to me; I’ll drink it,” and Kagami hands the tray over.

“Anything else?” he asks, grinning a little, “while I’m inclined to listen to you?”

“You always listen to me, in the end,” Kuroko says – almost murmurs – and Kagami wonders if he was meant to catch the words at all.

“Hey,” he says, “hey: only when you’re right,” which is, in some roundabout way, almost like saying, you usually are. He swings his bag onto his shoulder.

“Feel better soon, ‘kay? Practice isn’t the same without you. And I feel like I haven’t been startled in ages.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment or an insult?” Kuroko asks him, and Kagami shrugs.

“Whatever floats your boat,” he says, “I gotta get going; it’s getting late and I’ve got homework to do.”

Kuroko says, “thank you for coming.”

Kagami grins. “’bout time you said thanks, brat.” Kuroko blinks owlishly at him.

As he is closing the door, Kagami catches sight of Kuroko crumpling up another tissue. Kuroko breathes out, loosens his wrist, and tosses the tissue:

-and Kagami watches it fall, cleanly, right into the circle of the wastepaper basket.

***

 

 

 

 

 

end.

 

 


End file.
